It is often desirable to provide for communication of information via networked systems. For example, a vendor may wish to collect information with respect to the utilization and operation of equipment deployed at a customer site. Accordingly, electronic messages may be periodically or continually formed for reporting various metrics of interest to the vendor. Such electronic messages may be communicated from the equipment at the customer site to systems at the vendor location using available network links, such as those of the Internet.
Such messages may contain statistical information, historical information, current equipment status, alarms, etcetera. Irrespective of the content of the message, it may be desirable to deliver the message to an intended destination, such as to ensure accurate statistical analysis, complete historical data, accurate picture of current status, timely response to an alarm condition, etcetera.
However, often the infrastructure of the site at which such messages are originated, e.g., the aforementioned customer site, is not reliable. For example, there may be problems with the infrastructure itself, such as connectivity problems or attacks by viruses, or problems external thereto, such as connectivity problems that affect the operation of the infrastructure. Moreover, the particular site may not provide a persistent external network connection, e.g., a persistent high speed Internet connection may not be present. Accordingly, there may be periods of time where a particular communication path or transport mechanism is not available for transmission of the aforementioned messages, thereby resulting in the failure of such messages to reach an intended destination during this period of time.
For example, utilizing a message transport mechanism typically involves making a determination as to a message transport protocol and associated transport infrastructure to be used at the time of development of the message communication system or at the time of compiling the message communication code. Accordingly, the selection of a particular message transport mechanism is fixed very early and is implemented at a very low network layer, e.g., the physical layer. Thereafter, in operation, when the selected message transport mechanism is unavailable, such as due to the failure of a server providing arbitration of the selected protocol or communication with respect to a particular port being flooded as a result of a virus attack, message transmission fails.
Additionally, the configuration of infrastructure often changes over time, perhaps implementing new transport mechanisms and/or removing old transport mechanisms. In order to utilize newly available transport mechanisms, the aforementioned systems require very low level modification to the message communication system, such as by selection of the new transport mechanism and compiling of message communication software.